Seventy Regulars Came to My Wedding

My mom stood in the kitchen holding a stack of little white cards and saying “Oh, my word” over and over, like a prayer.

Then she got on the phone. She called the meat locker in Beloit and doubled the brisket order, and the man there said he’d smoke it himself on Friday night if he had to.

She called the Methodist women, who were doing the sides, and they said they’d make two more roasters of green beans and four more pans of scalloped potatoes.

Then the cafe people started calling her. Not to ask. To tell. Mrs. Pruitt was bringing three pans of lemon bars. The Bauer twins’ wives were bringing a sheet cake each, which turned into an argument about whose was better.

Wes Brandt’s wife said she’d bring her pickled beets, and nobody had the heart to tell her that nobody under seventy eats pickled beets.

The community building only had eighteen round tables. Dale Fisher borrowed six more from the Lutheran church in the next town and hauled them over in the back of his pickup, with the Bauer twins riding along to argue about how to tie them down.

I felt like the whole county was carrying my wedding on its shoulders. I had never felt so held up in my life.

The day itself was clear and hot and windy, a real Kansas June day, with the wheat just starting to turn gold out past the edge of town.

Harvest was maybe two weeks off. Tyler’s boss at the elevator had given him the whole week, and told him that if he showed up before Monday he’d fire him himself.

I got married at two o’clock in the Methodist church where I was baptized. My dad walked me down the aisle in a suit he’d bought for my grandpa’s funeral.

Tyler stood at the front in a gray vest and a white shirt with his hands folded in front of him, and when he saw me, his face did something I will keep for the rest of my life.

I looked out at the pews while the pastor read from First Corinthians, and I saw the liars’ table. All of them.

Bud was in the third row on the aisle, in a western shirt and his good bolo tie, sitting up as straight as a fence post.

We came out of the church to a crowd on the steps throwing birdseed, because rice is bad for the birds, and the wind blew most of it back on the crowd.

Then we all drove the four blocks to the community building, honking.

The community building was built in 1962 with money from a bake sale and a grain auction, and it smells like floor wax and old coffee and a hundred years of funeral lunches.

My cousins had spent all morning hanging string lights from the rafters, crisscrossing them over the whole hall. With the blinds pulled, they looked like stars.

By four o’clock every chair was full. The round tables were packed with gray heads and church clothes. The coffee men had pushed three tables together by the back wall, the way they’d sit at the cafe, and somebody had put a little hand-lettered card in the middle that said Liars’ Table.

I found out later that at four o’clock the Corner Cafe opened for Saturday supper the same as it had for forty years.